2025: The Year We Got Used To It
A final long read for 2025, charting how we got used to cruelty, incompetence and farce - and how 2026 will need us all to be much noisier.
We are officially at the precipice of the end of 2025, yet another year that went, if I’m being very honest, a bit tits up, and when I look back at the past twelve months, a big part of me can’t help but quietly mutter to myself, what the actual fuck just happened here1?
And I’m not talking in the rhetorical sense you’ve come to expect from me - I’m talking a full-on head tilted, fully baffled, slightly disassociated confusion.
To me 2025 wasn’t just a “bad year” in a neat, summarise-it-with-a-list or lets focus on three or four inflection points kind of way, it was a year of escalation while sliding down as well. Norms kept collapsing in one dramatic moment after another, but they kept happening so often, that it feels like I had become completely numb to them by September, and by November, I feel like I looked up and found that the world had become just a bit more completely screwed than would normally be acceptable.
The short of it is that this was the year in which absurdity stopped feeling like an interruption and started feeling, well and fully, like it had now officially become the operating system - the very long of it is that there is a lot to get through, so if you haven’t done so already, I would strongly suggest a cup of coffee, a biscuit (or two) and a comfortable place to sit.
January to March: The Year Announces Itself
The year opened with Elon Musk calling Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” over grooming gangs, which should have been the sort of thing that would result in him become persona-non-grata for an indefinite period of time. Instead, it became the opening salvo in what would become a year-long campaign of interference in British politics that included, at various points, calls for civil war and the toppling of our government. An inauspicious start, certainly, but one that set the tone for everything that followed - which is to say, a tone of “surely this can’t be normal” that would, by December, feel quaint in its naivety.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump was having his 34 counts of falsifying business records vacated just in time for his second term, which he celebrated by launching his very own cryptocurrency days before the inauguration2. His first acts in office included pardoning 1,600 people convicted of or awaiting conviction for their roles in attempting to overthrow democracy on January 6th, which is the sort of thing that should have been a five-alarm fire but instead got filed under “well, what did we expect?”
Musk, not content with interfering in the UK’s political world took up a role in the US government and created DOGE on the 20th of January and immediately spiralled into announcing BIG SCARY NUMBERS about federal spending while demonstrating a comprehensive misunderstanding of what any of it actually meant. Mass layoffs followed. Agencies were gutted. The confidence-to-competence ratio was staggering.
Back home, Labour was already showing us exactly who they were going to be - kicking social care reform into the long grass until 2028, which is a truly inspired way of saying “not our problem” when the sector is already in a perma-crisis. They also announced the abolition of NHS England, which was, on balance, a good move. The problem, as would become a recurring theme for this government, was that the implementation was utterly shoddy. It would take until November to agree funding for the redundancy costs - and by “agree funding,” I mean they agreed to allow an overspend. Still unfunded, then. Brilliant.
In February, Reform UK led in an opinion poll for the first time, polling at 25% compared to Labour’s 24%, and the UK’s media collectively lost what remained of their minds. They spent the rest of the year treating Reform as the incoming government despite the next general election being years away, with absolutely no self-awareness about their own role in aggrandising Farage for the better part of a decade. Also in February, Nathan Gill, former Reform UK leader in Wales, was charged with offences relating to bribery - the beginning of what would become a massive story about Russian influence operations that somehow never quite stuck to Farage himself.
The month’s crown jewel of awfulness, though, was Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Trump and JD Vance at the White House. It was less a diplomatic engagement and more a public humiliation - Zelensky was berated for not wearing a suit, subjected to bad metaphors about who holds which cards, and generally treated to what felt like an ambush. It had everything you could want from a display of American diplomatic rot, and it would set the tone for how Ukraine would be treated for the rest of the year.
March brought Trump’s tariff adventure in earnest - 25% on Canadian and Mexican goods, dropped to 12%, then suspended, but not for long. It was the opening act of what would become the weirdest adventure around taxation we could have possibly expected. He also stopped military aid to Ukraine and, for reasons that remain baffling, stopped sharing intelligence with them as well, only to reinstate them a little while later.
And Liz Truss, because of course she did, sent Keir Starmer a cease and desist letter for saying she crashed the economy. Reader, she did, indeed, crash the economy. Her lack of self-awareness would only propel her further into madness as the year went on3, but in January it still felt like an amusing sideshow rather than a preview of how detached from reality our political class would become.
April to June: Absurdity Becomes Infrastructure
By April, we were being treated to Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours, which included a knighthood for Michael Gove, thereby reinforcing that the honours system in this country is completely unhinged and not fit for any sort of purpose., but that was just the aperitif.
On the second of April, Trump announced Liberation Day - a 10% baseline universal tariff on all goods imported to the US, plus reciprocal tariffs calculated on trade imbalances. The result was complete chaos. A 10% tariff on an island inhabited exclusively by penguins. A 50% tariff on Lesotho, a landlocked country in South Africa. Trump supporters celebrated, not understanding that they would be the ones paying these tariffs, not other countries. It was economic policy as performance art, except the audience was also the victim. In the same month, the US recorded multiple measles deaths in children, because vaccination is apparently too “liberal” now.
Hope not Hate found that Reform UK was fielding local election candidates who had posted hate, pushed far-right conspiracies and praised extremists. Farage responded vaguely about “vetting.” Nothing happened. This would become the pattern - exposure, vague promises, nothing.
The May local elections saw Reform win control of Kent, Staffordshire, Durham and a few other councils, and the media convinced themselves this was the second coming. Reform immediately made radical changes like getting angry and confused about flags4. We also got Andrea Jenkyns as Lincolnshire Mayor and Sarah Pochin as MP for Runcorn and Helsby, which felt less like democratic outcomes and more like the universe testing how much absurdity we could tolerate.
Elon Musk departed as head of DOGE in May, having achieved not very much. His two trillion dollars in savings amounted to significantly less than that, and the costs of the programmes he cut would be felt for years. But he’d gotten his headlines, which was presumably the point.
On the 12th of May, the great punchdown on migrants began in earnest with Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, evoking none other than Enoch Powell himself5. It was at this point that my own view of Labour started to seriously turn. It looked reactionary to Reform winning some council seats, and it was the moment when it became clear that Labour’s strategy was going to be “what if we just did Reform’s policies, but not in crayon?”
June brought the confirmation that Trump would be getting his second state visit in September, and a large-scale rebellion against the government’s proposed welfare reforms started, largely because they were all a bit shit and punchy-downy.
DOGE UK came into existence, copied and pasted from the US but with none of the actual authority to do anything. This led to months of breathless announcements by Reform about local government spending that they largely didn’t understand. There was noise, then reality set in, and DOGE quietly disappeared towards the end of the having achieved not very much beyond opportunities for people like me to make fun of their idiocy. Zia Yusuf resigned as Reform Chairman6 and was replaced by Dr David Bull, a TV presenter, because why would you want actual political experience?
And then, gloriously, the internet exploded when Elon Musk and Donald Trump started publicly feuding. Musk hated the Big Beautiful Bill. Trump hated Musk publicly. Musk accused Trump of being in the Epstein Files (he is). Trump said Musk went crazy. The most powerful person in the world fighting with the richest person in the world on the internet like bargain bin trolls.
We weren’t even halfway through the year.
July to September: The Collapse of Pretence
July opened with an attempted coup d’état - not an important one, nor really a real one, but one described that way by Reform UK because the CEO of Warwickshire County Council refused to take down a Progress Pride Flag before the end of Pride Month7. Again: flags, angry, confused. Also in July, Zarah Sultana announced she was leaving Labour to establish a political party with Jeremy Corbyn - this was something of a surprise to everyone, especially Jeremy Corbyn, who up to that point had no idea it was happening. They went with it anyway. It turned into a disaster, as anyone with functioning brain cells could have predicted.
In the US, things took a further turn towards the fascist with Alligator Alcatraz taking in its first round of immigrant detainees. Conditions were inhumane. MAGA celebrated. The Big Beautiful Bill was passed, promising massive tax breaks that would only come into full effect after the 2026 mid-term elections. Funny, that. Trump also announced fifty percent tariffs against Brazil after his good mate Bolsonaro was put on trial for trying to overturn the election he lost - weird how Trump would have an affinity for that, right?
Twitter broke further with its own robot, Grok, announcing that it was “MechaHitler” and threatening violence against users. It was utterly batshit. Linda Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X. The platform continued to degrade into a hellscape, which at this point felt less like news and more like a weather report.
Rushanara Ali resigned as homeless minister following revelations that she was being a bit dodgy about rent increases on properties she owns. David Lammy became best mates with JD Vance and went fishing with him, which was nauseating to witness. Nigel Farage, the man who has railed against “unelected bureaucrats” his whole political career, asked Keir Starmer if he could also have a few unelected people in the House of Lords8.
Farage also ramped up rhetoric against migrants with a completely unworkable plan to deport over 600,000 migrants over five years for a mere £10bn. Everyone should have been laughing at him. The media treated him seriously. Reform UK in Nottinghamshire Council decided that press freedom wasn’t for everyone and banned local reporting. Nothing dodgy there at all.
In the US, Trump ramped up the fascism dial with the deployment of troops in Washington DC and placed the capital’s police under federal control. He also had a little chat with Vladimir Putin in Alaska about ending the war in Ukraine. The war did not end. As a reminder, the Tangerine Tit told everyone who would listen he would end the war in 24 hours. He did not.
August also gave us “Operation Raise the Colours” - a seemingly coordinated effort to plaster cheap, Temu-grade English flags across town centres, lampposts and mini-roundabouts right across the country. This was framed by the organisers, with completely straight faces, as spontaneous eruptions of patriotism, however, anyone with a functioning sense of context could see exactly what it was: an intimidatory claiming of space that was aimed squarely at migrants and minorities under the guise of national pride9. That this outpouring was loudly supported by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon should have removed any ambiguity, but once again, we were invited to politely pretend that a movement that’s obsessed with borders, flags and “who belongs” was merely engaging in harmless decor, leading to the utterly unhinged spectacle of Yvette Cooper herself telling anyone who would listen about her own love of flags.
September brought Zack Polanski as the elected leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, finally giving some hope to those disillusioned on the left, especially after the complete farce of the Sultana/Corbyn experiment kept flailing from crisis to crisis.
In a serious blow to the government, Angela Rayner resigned as both Deputy PM and Deputy Leader after admitting she’d underpaid stamp duty on her flat in Hove. David Lammy became Deputy PM and Shabana Mahmood replaced Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary. Mahmood very quickly made it known that migrants were going to be her punching bag.
Reform UK had its conference, which included vaccine conspiracies, Jeremy Kyle and Andrea Jenkyns singing. It was utterly surreal. Lobbyists flocked there, because of course they did. Peter Mandelson was found to have been far closer to Jeffrey Epstein than previously reported and got chucked in the bin as ambassador to the United States. Good.
Reform ramped up anti-migrant rhetoric by stating it would abolish the right of migrants to qualify for permanent settlement after five years. Not to be outdone, Shabana Mahmood used her Labour Conference speech to announce that Labour would just increase the ILR qualifying period to ten years and add arbitrary requirements for migrants to belong. The race to the bottom was in full sprint.
Trump signed an Executive Order to “rename” the Department of Defence to the “Department of War” (it had no legal standing, but anything to keep Pete Hegseth occupied). Hegseth later addressed 800 US generals and admirals and basically pissed all over the US military. Nothing happened. This was now normal.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a campus event in Utah, and MAGA used it as a reason to crack down on liberals and lefties, with Antifa being designated a terrorist organisation despite being an ideology with no real infrastructure. The House Oversight Committee released the “birthday book” which included a drawing by Trump. Much obfuscation happened.
Mid-September, Trump was in the UK again. It was largely a non-event since they kept him away from anywhere he might run into something uncomfortable. Our relationship with the US did not improve. We still got bullied.
October to December: Living in the Rubble
October kicked off with the Conservative Party Conference. The Conservatives are not okay, and we need them to be - their failure is a large part of why Reform is surging. We have Kemi Badenoch instead. Later that month, Tory MP Katie Lam called for even settled families to be deported from the UK to make it “culturally coherent.” Badenoch did nothing of note about it.
Reform kept flailing - this time with Linden Kemkaran being exposed on camera berating Kent County Councillors on a Teams call, leading to four Reform councillors being suspended for leaking the footage. Nothing happened to Kemkaran. Two more Reform councillors were suspended later for bringing the party into disrepute. Zia Yusuf resigned for the second time this year, this time as Head of Doge, handing over what had at this point become a pretty non-existent exercise to Richard Tice who, to be fair, is the perfect man to run something of literally zero importance.
In a by-election in October, after holding the seat for nearly 26 years, Labour lost Caerphilly in Wales to Plaid Cymru. Much analysis was done, none of it good for Labour.
Prince Andrew officially became Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after being stripped of his titles and booted out of his property on the back of even more Epstein revelations. Good. He can fuck off.
In the US, a federal shutdown began and lasted until 12 November, making it the longest in history. It was also Nobel Prize month. Trump didn’t win it. The White House accused the Nobel Committee of placing politics over peace, which was as insane as it sounds. FIFA gave Trump an award instead, because of course they did. No King’s Protests were held across the US and became one of the largest protest movements in American history. MAGA dismissed it as AI and took a huge hit of copium.
November became budget lead-up time, and it went crazy. Rachel Reeves called 8am press conferences that panicked everyone. The Telegraph ran increasingly deranged headlines that gave the impression that Reeves was personally standing outside your nan’s home with a clipboard waiting to take note of the silverware to tax. The budget came, it was nothing revolutionary. Some drama around the OBR publishing forty minutes before the actual statement led to Richard Hughes resigning.
Nathan Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery related to a pro-Russian influence campaign. You would think things would get uncomfortable for Nigel Farage. They did not. Further accusations of racism in his youth came out about Farage - he veered wildly from saying he would never say such things to he would never be racist in a malicious way10.
Zack Polanski continued to impress with his radical idea that immigrants are not, in fact, the root of all evil. He got slated by traditional media for this.
In terms of the final instalment of flags, and because the universe has a sense of humour that’s as dry as it is cruel, December also delivered the final punchline in this long-running arc - councils unable to install Christmas lights because “Operation Raise The Colours” flags were physically blocking the infrastructure. What followed was a brief but furious moral panic in which “they’re cancelling Christmas” collided delightfully head on with “don’t touch our flags”. It was, without a doubt, the perfect microcosm for the year - a problem that had been entirely manufactured by culture war posturing was reframed as persecution and argued about in the media.
In the United States emails came out stating that Donald Trump “knew about the girls” being abused by Epstein and “spent hours” with one of the victims. The Epstein saga started to gain traction with even Marjorie Taylor Greene turning against Trump, which led to him calling her a lunatic on Truth Social. The House voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to release all of its Epstein Files. Trump suddenly pivoted to make it sound like he’d supported this all along while calling it a Democrat hoax.
Pete Hegseth was accused of war crimes in strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Jonathan Gullis defected to Reform, joining Nadine Dorries and Danny Kruger who’d changed their blue rosettes for turquoise ones earlier in the year. Bonny Blue struck out in support of Reform UK, leading to an uncomfortable admission by Danny Kruger that Reform would take support from wherever they could get it.
Labour watered down its IHT on farmers, increasing the threshold from £1m to £2.5m. The Dyson guy was still not impressed. He can fuck off.
The Epstein files were released in the US, heavily redacted and incomplete. Things started getting more and more uncomfortable for many people, though not uncomfortable enough to actually do anything about it. No one has been meaningfully held to account, and it doesn’t look like anyone will be.
And that is the year in the now 24 hours or so away from being a rear-view mirror.
The best way I can describe it is a year not in which everything broke all in one go, but as one where far too many things failed to matter when they really should have done. Time after time it felt like scandal blurred into background noise and where outrage blunted its edge through sheer overuse. There was no real single dangerous thing event that happened that stands out, but the overall feeling of how quickly we’re expected to absorb the completely insane has become totally normalised.
Obviously there is so much more that happened that I didn’t cover in this piece - and for good reason, it would very easily have turned into a novella of sorts that would make for a rather hard read if it came to it. There are indeed entire movements, quiet policy shifts, local battles, personal reckonings, moments of grace and moments of cruelty that didn’t make the cuts, but these are the moments, that for me at least, best captured the texture of the year - the absurdity, cruelty, farce and creeping sense that we really are being asked to accept far too much as inevitable.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, because for all of this nonsense, all of the corruption, cowardice, spectacle and outright moral rot, people did not stop pushing back. They didn’t stop organising, they didn’t stop calling out bullshit and they didn’t stop caring, even when it became completely exhausting to do so. People kept showing up when it really mattered - for migrants, for trans people, for workers, for truth, for the idea that politics should actually improve people’s lives and not just be a vehicle for giving power to the people with the most power already.
If there is one lesson that I will personally take from 2025 it’s that we’ve seen how bad things can get when power gets exercised without restraint, and just how rough things can get when cruelty is rebranded as realism, but, it’s also shown me that it can be hobbled, exposed and countered as long as we don’t give them our silence.
I don’t honestly know what 2026 will bring, every year since about 2020 has taught us that prediction is a mug’s game anyway, but I do know this:
I will continue doing my thing, potentially with a lot more time on my hands from March this year. I will keep shouting into the intervoids in the hope that my voice, along with so many others, will continue to expose, contextualise and explain and hope that in my own small way, I can continue to make a difference, even if it is just on an individual level.
In the meantime, I invite you all to take a breath, enjoy the last few days of Betwtixtmas before we head once more unto the breach that I expect 2026 will no doubt be.
Best,
Bear
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. This year asked a lot of our attention, patience, and emotional bandwidth - and none of us had much spare.
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I recognise here that this statement would not go well in a normal political analysis of 2025, but we are where we are.
Nothing screams “rule of law” quite like the monetisation of your own office before you’ve even unpacked the Home Bargains Gold Collection with which to decorate it.
Culminating into the “Liz Truss Show” on YouTube which is as batshit as it sounds.
Flags will become a recurring theme in this post.
There’s obviously nothing that steadies a government quite like reaching for a ghost from the 1960s and 70s.
This would be his first resignation for the year.
The bar for revolutionary struggle is now apparently bunting-adjacent and just a little bit fabulous.
Principles, as ever, are extremely flexible when power is on offer.
Aesthetic nationalism at £1.99 a flag.
Non-malicious racism, the acceptable kind.
I think I have to call 2025 the year of greed and hate. Those with more than too much aren't satisfied with what they have so they stir up hate. In my 72 years, I've never known a year like it. That people got put into the house of Lords, who instead should have been in front of a court, is beyond me. Blatant liars like Johnson and Farage have done so much damage, they too should be in front of a Judge. I won't even go there with Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, each one evil and guilty of so many crimes against humanity. I despair! However, that there are decent people calling out the evil, lying, greedy and just plain nasty, gives me some hope that there are more of us who can make a difference. Hope you had a good Xmas and I wish you a happy new year.
2025: the year equivalent of a ‘floater’ that just won’t flush.